


The Book of Gold

by Bobsled_Hostage



Category: The Library of Babel - Jorge Luis Borges
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Coital Cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:54:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23102794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bobsled_Hostage/pseuds/Bobsled_Hostage
Summary: The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species --the unique species --is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 2





	The Book of Gold

The library was cold. It was infinite and the life was going out of it. The greater part of the librarians were dead and the survivors knew nothing. They were curators rather than authors of books, and without word of mouth, little of their knowledge was passed down in writing. Their descendents grew up unlettered, and the descendents of those descendents grew up feral.

This cold, depopulated waste is where the pilgrims met. She carried a piece of a bannister, one end filed down to a sharp point. He wielded a knife, shaved from a shattered floor tile with a cloth handle, given to him by his parents as a farewell present. They carried these sharp objects as protection from brigands and bloodcults. They worried they would have to use them.

He raised his hand in greeting, the way the books had told him.

She raised hers, the way her mother had taught her.

* * *

He bent her over the railing, with her legs spread and her tits swinging over the shaft. She gripped the rail white knuckled and pushed back, fearful of the infinite downward expanse below and falling debris from above. He held her by the hips, she braced herself against the rail and they fucked, ready to fall backwards if the balcony should give way. Of the ropes of jism he prudently squirted between her legs, some fell into the shaft. He had read in one book that each of a man’s seeds contained a homunculus who would grow to become that man’s descendent, in another that one dram of semen held as much information as the library itself, in similarly infinite possible combinations. He thought of either being abraded away by air resistance over a thousand years, until separated into their individual atoms. He thought of the falling drops freezing as the library grew ever colder and colder.

She rinsed herself and came out of the vestibule to find him sitting against one of the shelves, reading a book. Sat down next to him, muscling into his space to see what it was.

She was not illiterate, as he had thought. She scorned the written word for its innumerable frustrations. Stories which used words which she did not know the meaning of, having no frame of reference for _ocean_ and _Damascus_ and _starlight_. Dictionaries and encyclopedias were of no help, as each could ascribe to any word a completely spurious meaning, divorced from that of that used in the narrative. He countered that though the contents of the books could not be checked against one another, surely it was possible to find the meaning of these obscure words through the context in which they were presented, and the definitions could be cross checked against external reality to ascertain their veracity.

She condemned him a fool for believing that his sense of the world around him was any less a lie than the words on the pages. He elbowed her in the ribs, irritated by the unfalsifiability of this. She laughed and pulled the blanket closer around them.

There was a worse betrayal, she whispered, to be found in the printed page. Even when she understood the contents of a book, there was never any guarantee of legibility. A book which was gibberish from the start could safely be consigned to the shaft, or burned for warmth. A book that was legible until the halfway point, or the last chapter, was a more insidious trap. These books ensnared her imagination, transporting her to other worlds, then descended at random junctures into inscrutable word salad and aphasic gibberish. Spoiling any hope of resolution for the plot or characters. Enough of these disappointments had turned her off the concept entirely.

He said that this was so, and wasn’t it a splendid metaphor for life? That each cover might hold a series of unconnected occurrences, or a bitter disappointment, or a moment of sublime beauty. The proper reaction was to pull another off the shelves and start anew. Or would she give up on life, too?

Her mother hanged herself when she was about 16. Not with a leap into the shaft as might be expected, but the more practical expedient of securing one end of the rope to the vestibule door, the other to her neck, and leaning forward on her knees. She left no suicide note, though logic dictates that its contents must appear somewhere in the library’s infinite volumes.

He didn’t say much after that.

* * *

Rather than sleep upright in the vestibule, as was the custom, she had a piece of clothing sewn shut around a bundle of soft fabric. He declared this to be a “pillow” in an attempt to vindicate the dictionary where he had read so. She hit him with it. She let him sleep on it too, on condition that she be granted the use of his chest for the same purpose.

Her dreams were oceans and marble cliffs, palaces and pampas, blue tigers. All the untamed worlds of life and death, stone and river, beast and tree. Palaces of the mind. Visions of a world that she had, in waking, been determined to cast aside

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to everyone who read Library of Babel and thought “man wouldn’t it be sick to fuck on that railing over the bottomless pit”


End file.
